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How can the burning rate of kerosene and LPG be determined?

Ahana Shrestha
Practical Action
related country: Nepal
KnowledgePointAdmin
RedR CCDRR
related country: Nepal

How can the burning rate of kerosene while cooking be compared to the rate of LPG used while cooking to determine which is most cost-effective/serving? For instance how long will 1 liter of Kerosene/LPG burn before going off? The potential beneficiaries of this information are 1000 homes that need to start using LPG in place of kerosene for cooking


2 Answers

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RedR TSS
RedR TSS

Hullo

Apologies for delay in responding. Your question has been passed directly to our experts and, hopefully, some answers will be posted here soon.

K/ rgds, Leigh

LC Jones

RedR KP KnowledgePoint Moderator

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Paul Kirwan
RedR

While there is a way of directly comparing the two fuels through their relative calorific values, this is only going to provide a theoretical comparison not a real world figure, nor would it take into account the standard container sizes, which might be for instance a 5 or 10 or 25 ltr kerosene container and then the various standard sized bottles of compressed gas which might be available to residents. Likewise the relative costs involved in respect to the two fuels should be considered.

This figure will not be so helpful, as under real world conditions a kerosene burner is likely to be rather inefficient, so may an LPG burner but less likely to be a long way off from a proper combustion range - just because the burner fuel/air ratio will be at least partially set during the manufacture of that burner.

Best suggestion would be a real world test comparing current kerosene usage ( easy to check ) versus perhaps the same families using LPG stoves and measuring the financial costs rather than the heat values per kg of fuel.

A couple of points that occur to me:

Inefficient combustion of Kerosene produces carbon monoxide among others gasses as combustion products, and is responsible for many health conditions and deaths, so there is a further compelling reason to change away from Kerosene. LPG requires care in its use since gas leaks have obvious dangers.

LPG is Propane which is heavier than air, so 'pools' on floors when leaking from bottle/pipework systems and is an asphyxiation threat and/or explode threat under the wrong conditions. If the end users are not familiar with use of LPG there is an education/familiarisation process to consider.

Kerosene is more likely available, while LPG requires a technical operation and some competence of compressed gas safety during its storage and transfer.

Finally, have you considered solar stoves?

These are worth checking out and come in a variety of types form simple temporary fold up systems useful in refugee settings, to more permanent types which can hugely off-set fuel requirements, depending on climate/sunshine of course. They can be used in parallel to kerosene/lpg stoves when the sun is shining and will make a big impact on day to day fuel costs, though convincing people that they work / are worth bothering with may take some time.